PNTV: Love by Leo Buscaglia (#67)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got an episode on Leo Buscaglia's Love what Life Is All About. Awesome book as always. Great book. Six page PDF Philosopher's Note Love. It's really cool book, really timely. I just got married well a few weeks ago now. Got a little bubbling going on. Very excited after three years from our first date, Alexandra and I got married. Super excited. And what's really cool is that on our first date we were talking about this book. She was the first woman I met who had read this book more than once actually who'd ever read it. And she happened to have read it more than once. I thought that was the coolest thing. I think I started falling in love minutes into our first hike and just really, we both believed in what Buscali was talking about and it was a really cool compass for us as we were deepening our relationship and learning and making the mistakes and coming back to what works. This was one of the formative tools that we used and since then we've been blessed to have gain Katie Hendricks in our life. We, we actually just came back from their house, they're about a mile away and did a meditation with them and just hung out. It was awesome. There are models of what's possible in a relationship. Check out the note on Gay and Katie Hendrix. Check them out@hendricks.com and on Facebook they've got a cool little group going on where they share daily wisdom and stuff like that. They're just extraordinary. So love what life is all about. Number one thing with love that we need to remember that. Buscaglia points out that I quote twice on the first page in the note. We've got to study love if we want to master love. If we want to truly experience extraordinary relationships, we've got to study how to have extraordinary relationships. It's mind boggling to me how little we teach these fundamental skills to people, whether it's relationships or nutrition or exercise or discovering our purpose or living a life of meaning, controlling our thoughts and having optimism. It's mind boggling the that we don't have courses on this throughout our upbringing. Whole long conversation we're going to have hopefully together in the months and years and decades ahead as I study this and as we study this. But for now, studying love, he says, you wouldn't go to an auto mechanic who hadn't studied cars and how to fix and repair cars. You wouldn't go to dinner at a restaurant with a chef who hadn't studied how to create awesome meals. Why is it then that we enter relationships with people who haven't studied love and we haven't studied love? It doesn't make any sense. So let's not fall into that. Let's study love. This is a big step toward it. Check out the book. All kinds of other great stuff. I'm also probably going to do top tens on different subjects, including love and relationships. I'm really excited about that. For now, back to Leo Buscaglia. The first step beyond recognizing we've got to study love is we've got to love ourselves. Buscaglia says you can't give what you don't have. You've got to love yourself if you want to love others. If you have a hateful relationship with yourself, there's no way you're going to have a consistently loving relationship with anyone in your life. So the greatest way you can love others in your life is to learn to love yourself more. It's a huge idea. You cannot give what you do not have. Ayn Rand talks about this. She says, in order to say I love you, one must first be able to say the I. We've got to have a strong sense of self. We've got to have a strong sense of who we are, an appreciation for ourselves, a love for ourselves, in order to give that to those we have in our lives and those that we want to love fully. Really, really, really, really, really, really, really big idea. So what things can you do in your life to love yourself more? For me, I mentioned this often. I meditate. I love myself enough to do the things that make me feel good so that I'm as radiantly alive as I can be. For Alexandra and for everyone else in my life, I meditate, I exercise, I train diligently and intensely. I journal. I create and produce these. I do the things that I know make me feel good. So. So what can you do in your life that will help you embody the ideals that you believe in? Love yourself more and therefore love others more. Really cool idea. He's got a great idea here. He says one does not fall in or out of love. One grows in love. Isn't that cool? One doesn't fall in or out of love. One grows in love. I love that you. And when a core intention he talks about the importance of relationships are essentially two strong human beings who are coming together, who are healthy, who are committed to being healthier, who are committed to actualizing and Living at their highest potential, who decide to co create their ideal lives together. Who decide to fully express themselves in this precious hero's journeys that we have together in partnership. But the moment that a relationship stops being that this co evolving, co creating dynamic and it becomes about me making you happy or you making me happy, we become attached to one another. That's not love, Buscaglia says. That's dependency. Huge difference between attachment and dependency and love. Love is a co creative, actualizing, co evolving process where the two people are in relationship together to support one another in their own actualization. Now, when you view love that way, you don't fall in or out of love. You grow in love. You spiral up. We've certainly had our ups and downs and ons and offs. We ended our relationship more than once or twice, ended our engagement, in fact for four or five or six months and learned a lot. And learned. I learned that I needed to practice love. Not only did I need to study love, I needed to practice it. And I needed to start with myself and realize that our relationship was an incredible context to grow. Really, really cool idea. We can talk about that for a weekend and maybe we will sometime. How about another idea kind of tied to the loving yourself? He says you need to be yourself. Russell Simmons says you need to do you. He says you got to be yourself. That's what life is all about. If you're going to try to be someone else, a version of yourself that you think other people want to see from you, you're never going to be vital. You're never going to be happy, you're never going to love yourself. You've got to be yourself again. Do you? By Russell Simmons. Awesome book. We've got a note on it. Check it out. It's all about that. Having the intensity to follow your bliss. Trust yourself and do you fully express yourself. And you're going to suffer to the extent you're not honoring your unique trust, true, highest self. He talks about the fact that loving people abhor waste. They abhor waste of any kind. They don't waste time. They don't sit there and fleet away their flit away their life doing meaningless stuff. They don't waste human potential. They're here to live, to fully give themselves to the world. They realize that they're not going to live forever. Waste. One of the ways we can do that, he says, is to say yes to the world. He says that's one of the most powerful words in our language. Say yes to possibilities. Of course we've got to Be able to say no as well. In order to open up and invite the deeper yeses, we've got to be able to say yes to potential and to coolness in our lives. He talks about the importance of touch and how we've got to cuddle. You know, we've got to take the time to give hugs. He, he was a big hugger. Apparently if you came within three feet of him, you got a hug. Big, big, big hugger. I'm not sure if it's in this book or somewhere else, but he talks about the fact that. Or people talk about the fact that babies, if you leave a baby completely alone, you don't give them any touch, even if you feed them, but you don't give them any touch, they'll die. We need human touch. We live on connection.

We live.

We need one another. So to open to that is huge. One of the exercises I have here in the note is asking who do you love? Who in your life do you love? Just deeply appreciate. It's an awesome thing to reflect on. And then who are you loved by? Who are you blessed to be loved by? See the connection of the love that you give and the love that you receive. Beautiful, beautiful idea. He says we can't underestimate the power of a touch. A smile, a kind word, just a simple nourishing, you look great today, or I really appreciate the great service you just gave me, or whatever it is in the simplest way can mean so much to different people and to ourselves as we give it. Wayne Dyer talks about the fact that when we do something kind, we have serotonin, the happy drug released in our brain. And, and the person receiving the act of kindness has serotonin too. And the person or people observing the event of kindness have serotonin in their brains. It's good. It nourishes us to be kind, to be generous. Really, really cool. We wrap up this note with a comment. He says, look, you gotta live for something. He suggests, live for giving joy to others. Live for giving yourself most fully in service to the world. Really cool idea. That's love in a nutshell. Hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See you soon. Bye. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

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